BY KEVIN KELLY

The summer of 1940 must have been spellbinding for participants in the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Among the fellows invited to the magical mountain that long-ago August were three first-timers: poet John Ciardi and novelists Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. All "were clearly destined for great futures," observes David Bain, a Middlebury College professor who has written a history of the conference. Also on hand to give readings were W.H. Auden, a giant of 20th century poetry, and Katherine Anne Porter, then a short story writer praised by a New York Times reviewer in April 1940 for "the crystal clearness of her style, the perfect imagery."

Many of the 79 other summers on the college's campus, in Ripton, astride the Green Mountain National Forest, have also been memorable for the quality of the conference's instructors and students. Some of the big names in American literature who have taught, read or studied at Bread Loaf include novelists Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Wallace Stegner, William Styron, Norman Mailer, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Tim O'Brien and Joan Didion as well as poets William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton and Archibald MacLeish.

Plus, of course, Robert Frost, generally regarded as the bard of Bread Loaf.

The conference itself has secured a place in the literary annals of the United States. "If you read any history of 20th century American literature," says current conference director Michael Collier, "you're bound to run across a mention of Bread Loaf. For any young writer," he adds, "Bread Loaf is a destination."

It wasn't long after its inception in 1926 that the annual conclave began acquiring a cachet that would attract ambitious young writers from across the country. By 1960, Bread Loaf was already viewed as "the grande dame of American writers' conferences," says Audrey Gonzalez, who was a student that year at Hollins College in Virginia. Now an Anglican minister and aspiring poet living in Memphis, Gonzalez will be attending the conference for the first time this August.

The conference's reputation has also started to spread beyond America's borders. Bread Loaf organizers are recruiting writers from Africa and the Caribbean as part of Collier's efforts to give the conference a global dimension. A fellowship endowed by two former participants - Marylee and Michael Fairbanks - is enabling Ugandan novelist Glaydah Mamukasa to travel to Ripton this summer to give readings and conduct workshops.

Collier, a widely published poet, has been shifting the focus of Bread Loaf since his appointment as director 11 years ago. "I've put more emphasis on the teaching aspects," he says, noting that the conference had previously been "more of a performance event where writers would hold forth." The change might be expected, given that Collier has himself been a teacher for many years at the University of Maryland.

Workshops have always been part of the conference format, but they were often treated as ancillary events - not on a par with the experience of hearing a great man (or, occasionally, a great woman) read in an atmosphere of reverence usually associated with Scripture. The workshops were often little more than pro-forma exercises that "did not involve honest and thorough discussions of members' work," Collier says.

Besides increasing the number of workshops to 25 and reducing the size of each to a dozen participants, Collier has encouraged the faculty to hold informal conversations with tuition-paying attendees. That has meant discouraging instructors from retreating to the faculty lounge in between workshop sessions, where they had associated exclusively with one another. And Collier says he makes sure that faculty receive manuscripts of workshop members well in advance of the meetings so that the critiques will reflect forethought on the part of the professional writers.

Bread Loafers have a right to expect personal attention and methodical appraisals of their submissions. The cost of tuition, room and board for this summer's 11-day conference totals $2,164. And while a few Middlebury College students are given scholarships and some other undergrads and graduate students are accepted to the conference to work as waiters, financial aid is given to only 6 percent of those who apply for it.

At the same time, gaining admission to Bread Loaf may be viewed as a privilege for which gratitude is in order. Last year, the conference accepted 18 percent of those who sought admission. While attendance has remained relatively constant at around 200, the number of prospective Bread Loafers has grown from 600 at the start of the Collier era to about 1,500 this year. So, Bread Loaf over the years has become more selective. Years ago, says former assistant conference director Sandy Martin, the conference "would accept anyone who seemed reasonably sane," because there just weren't that many who applied.

In the deep Depression year of 1933, for example, only 20 apprentices made the pilgrimage up Route 125 to the sylvan setting.

This year's conference, while engendering great anticipation, is likely to be more staid and studious than some of those that took place as recently as 25 years ago. Collier himself recalls the "glamour and glitter" of the gathering in 1981, which was the first he attended, having just earned a graduate writing degree from the University of Arizona. John Irving was at the center of everyone's attention that year. Bread Loaf was abuzz with the news that Time magazine was about to run a cover story on the ruggedly charismatic novelist and his newly published best-seller, "The World According to Garp."

Poet Robert Pack was then one-third of the way into his 22-year tenure as conference director. Helen Schulman, a novelist and screenwriter who now runs the fiction program at the New School in Manhattan, remembers the latter part of the Pack era as Bread Loaf's "gonzo years." There was "lots of carousing" at Schulman's first conference in 1984 and at others she attended in subsequent summers. "It was exciting, and I really loved it," Schulman says. "It was like a summer camp to which groups of friends kept returning."

But Pack-period conferences were "not as devoted to teaching" as those that Collier has directed, Schulman says. "Bread Loaf has always been very hierarchical, but it doesn't feel that way now. Michael has balanced it in a way that students never feel overlooked."

That may not be entirely the case.

Margaret DeAngelis, a retired public school teacher in Harrisburg, Pa., terms her experience at a 2003 conference workshop "really brutal." The leader of that session "made it very clear she was bored with me and my work," DeAngelis says. But she has nevertheless returned to Bread Loaf each year since. "I realized the 2003 workshop was probably a uniquely bad experience," she explains. The following two conferences proved "glorious," says DeAngelis, who is planning to attend again this year.

Calling herself a "summer conference groupie," DeAngelis notes that Bread Loaf is one of three or four such gatherings she attends annually. But it is "the best-run from an administrative standpoint, and it's one of the most serious literary environments I've been in."

One of the Collier reforms that veteran Bread Loafers often cite was his termination of the tradition of serving pitchers of Bloody Marys at each day's luncheon.

Drinking had long been a hallmark, sometimes notoriously, of the Bread Loaf experience. Bain's history of the conference, published in 1993 under the title "Whose Woods These Are," describes the "boozy, lackluster and self-pitying" address delivered 60 years earlier by novelist Sinclair Lewis, best known as the author of "Babbitt." Having been "fortified by a bottle of whiskey," Lewis proceeded to distract his audience from the topic of his talk due to his "glassy eyes and slurred speech," Bain writes.

Alcohol gave way - at least partly - to marijuana and other drugs during conferences held in the 1960s and '70s. "We did have some problems" during those years, recalls Sandy Martin, but in general, he adds, attendees didn't behave "any differently than people in any sort of convention atmosphere."

It was inevitable and natural that the spirit of the '60s would make its way up the mountain, Martin says. "There was a strong desire on the part of young people to really participate. They had a sense they had something to offer too." Martin recalls "very, very lively discussions" stretching toward dawn in those days.

The conference has also been the scene of literary scandals, some of them associated with that beatified Bread Loafer, Robert Frost.

"You're a good poet, Robert. But you're a bad man," famed critic Bernard de Voto was overheard telling Frost at the conclusion of the 1938 conference, according to Bain's account. Frost had behaved boorishly throughout that year's sessions, motivated in part, it seems, by his political and literary resentment of poet Archibald MacLeish. Listeners were jarred during MacLeish's reading of one of his greatest poems by Frost's deliberately disruptive antics. Novelist and fellow audience member Wallace Stegner wrote that Frost, "playing around like an idle, inattentive boy in a classroom, had somehow contrived to strike a match and set fire to his handful of papers, and was busy beating them out and waving away the smoke."

Fiercely competitive toward other leading American poets, Frost routinely bad-mouthed many of those who came to read at Bread Loaf. Bain reports that Frost warned friends against "contamination" by the modernist work of William Carlos Williams who, in Frost's view, wrote "nothing but snippets of poems."

Jealousies were also fired off in Frost's direction. Bain tells of Truman Capote, then a 17-year-old office boy at The New Yorker, distracting attention from a Frost reading in the 1930s "by waiting until the eminence was a few minutes into his presentation and then starting up from his seat as if offended and noisily brushing past and over the knees of those row mates between him and the aisle."

Romance has, of course, flared just as spectacularly at Bread Loaf as has odium. Bain mentions the "torrid" affair played out on the mountain in 1963 between two prominent novelists. "They were like tragic teenagers," Bain quotes an unnamed Bread Loafer.

The tone of any conference generally reflects the proclivities and aims of its director, longtime associates say. Sandy Martin, who held high-level positions at Bread Loaf from 1965 to 1978, says that the coordinator during those years, John Ciardi, "resisted the trend seen at other conferences of bringing participants together with writers." Described by Bain as having "a magnificent Roman nose and a cruel, cynic's mouth," Ciardi believed, according to Martin, that "the best way a student could learn writing was by listening to professional writers talk about what they do and how they do it."

Besides favoring a pedagogical approach opposite that of Ciardi, who ran the conference for 27 years, Collier has sought to give the gathering a racial composition more like the country as a whole and less like Vermont.

It had been an almost entirely white Bread Loaf throughout the early decades. In 1945, however, the African-American novelist Richard Wright was invited to give a talk on "The Negro Problem." And in the 1950s, Negro Digest and Ebony magazine co-sponsored a scholarship for black participants. Ralph Ellison, author of the turning-point novel "Invisible Man," attended in 1959 to deliver lectures and to read participants' manuscripts. At the conference, he befriended a Rutgers undergraduate, Alan Chuese, who would later become known for his fiction and criticism.

One night during a party at the nearby Snow Bowl attended by Ellison and other faculty members, "someone started singing folk songs," Chuese recalled in an account included in Bain's book. "Pretty soon someone started up 'Old Black Joe.' I became incensed that someone would sing such a song in Ralph's presence and I leaped up and knocked over the huge trash bin full of beer cans, effectively ending the party. Big conscience, big drunk!"

Although the conference keeps no statistics on its racial makeup from year to year, Collier notes that there was only one black faculty member in 1994, the year prior to his appointment as director. This August, about 15 African-Americans will be teaching at Bread Loaf, Collier estimates.

The conference has achieved diversity in other ways as well. In 1961, cookbook author Julia Childs was in attendance, followed seven years later by Edmund Muskie, the senator from Maine who had unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination.

The age range of participants has also broadened noticeably in the past decade. Most participants are in their 20s and 30s, Bain notes, but some septuagenarians and octogenarians now attend as well.

Diversifying the staff and increasing the conference's visibility are cited by Bread Loaf board member Edward Knox as Collier's key achievements. "It took a very subtle blend of fellow writer and firm taskmaster to pull it off," Knox wrote in an e-mail message from Washington, D.C., "and I believe Michael has done so in a way that has gone even beyond our expectations."

Bread Loaf continues, however, to wrap itself in an aura of elitism, holding itself aloof from nearby communities, including Middlebury, home of the college that sponsors the conference. "Part of the mystique of the writers' conference is being a self-contained world on the mountain," says Jan Albers, director of the Middlebury-based Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History. "The public can go to readings at Bread Loaf, but that isn't publicized much."

Still, the conference does enhance Middlebury's reputation as a serious-minded college town, Albers suggests. "There's a certain spillover effect. Middlebury and Bread Loaf are associated in some people's minds."

A chief component of the conference's appeal, in Collier's view, is the camaraderie it cultivates among participants. Apart from basking in John Irving's aura at his initial conference in 1981, "the most important experience for me," Collier says, "was in making a group of friends who were more or less in the same place I was as a writer. Getting encouragement from them as a peer group was crucial. It's something Bread Loaf does for everyone."

Bain agrees. He first came to Bread Loaf in 1980 and "immediately fell in love with the place." The conference imparts "a sense of community and a sense of how we writers live in a diaspora," Bain said in a recent interview. "It gives us courage to make it through the winter months."

In addition to gaining inspiration from newfound friends, many students come to Bread Loaf to seek "validation" for their writing, Collier says. "Attendees can get expert advice on where they stand as writers."

That's the main attraction for Audrey Gonzales, the Memphis minister and former journalist who has been writing poetry for many years. "I want to know the truth about whether I'm a worthy candidate to be a published poet," she says.

The conference also gives each apprentice writer 15 treasured minutes to confer with editors and agents. This year, for example, Harcourt Brace editor-in-chief Andre Bernard is likely to be as big a draw as Pulitzer Prize finalist Ted Conover, a nonfiction contributor to The New York Times Magazine and author of "Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes."

The presence of about 25 agents and editors offers "an incredible opportunity for someone with a manuscript well in hand," says Anne Batterson, whose memoir, "The Black Swan," will soon be published by Scribner. An editor with Norton, another New York publishing house, whom she met at Bread Loaf "mentored me through two drafts of the book," Batterson says. She will be attending this August to work on a second book based on her 20 years' experience as a trekking guide in Nepal.

Bread Loaf "can be a career-making conference," adds Temple University doctoral student Niama Williams. Even though she's never been to Vermont, Williams says, she hopes her initial experience on the mountain will prove "transforming - based on its reputation."

For faculty members, the conference poses challenges in fulfilling such high expectations and in sustaining the Bread Loaf's weighty legacy. Noting that workshops include students with "a wide range of quality in their work," poet Carl Phillips says he strives to strike a delicate balance. "My job is to make the session informative to everybody. I've got to make sure no one is bored or feels that what's going on is over their head."

This August will mark the sixth year Phillips has taught at Bread Loaf. He says he feels unintimidated by the achievements of those who have gone before him, including Frost. "I do have a sense of being part of a long tradition to which I feel every living poet is an apprentice," Phillips says. "My ambition is not to be another Robert Frost but to be the best Carl Phillips."

The shadow of history that falls across Bread Loaf is deepened by the setting's seeming immutability. "Whenever you go back, it's like nothing has ever changed," Collier observes. "The yellow buildings are still yellow, the green of the shutters is still green. That's part of the magic of the place. It feels timeless despite the changes that occur in literary fashions."

Indeed, the Bread Loaf campus might be readily recognizable to Joseph Battell, who willed 30,000 acres of forest and farmland to Middlebury College in 1915. A breeder of Morgan horses and the publisher of a local newspaper, Battell was also the author of what Bain describes as "an almost unreadable novel" entitled "Ellen, or Whisperings of An Old Pine."

Battell had inherited a fortune from an industrialist uncle. He used a portion of that money to add a cupola to an existing Victorian farmhouse, which became the Bread Loaf Inn, and to build outlying cottages for his summer guests.

The interior of the wood-shingled inn looks much the way it did in photographs from the early years of the conference, Bain said during a recent tour of the premises. The Blue Parlor, where readings and receptions are held, remains strikingly attractive, its wavy wood-plank floor only accentuating its charm.

But time has not, of course, stood still at Bread Loaf. One indication is that participants can now make wireless connections to the Internet through their laptops.

Collier, 53, knows too that his directorship will not continue indefinitely. He and his wife, former librarian Katherine Branch, recently bought a home in Cornwall because they've "fallen in love with Vermont." While declining to divulge his plans for the coming years, Collier does say, "I'm very mindful that this institution does need to be periodically reinvented. That's what keeps it fresh."



Kevin Kelly is a Middlebury freelance writer.